I'm not disputing any of your other points, but what does "paying them what they’re actually worth" mean? Is there some objectively fair remuneration calculation that others are using and I wasn't aware of?
Lopsided power arrangements will always be grossly unfair to one side and generous the other. In this case it's Amazon vs the Precariat. Moreover, the two sides (and everyone else) will always have a very different idea about what is fair.
The best way to address this without directly getting into the vast grey-area of "what is fair" is to limit the political power of corporations and then address labor laws and union formation.
The sad thing is we've been through this before.
There's a reason labor unions came into being. Do we really have to wait until labor conditions for workers become the 21st century equivalent of Industrial Age steel mills run by robber-barrons? Can't we learn from history?
The way things are going I expect the social safety net to be cut out from under me by the time I hit retirement.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precariat > In sociology and economics, the precariat (/prɪˈkɛəriət/) is a neologism for a social class formed by people suffering from precarity, which means existing without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare.
This article at la Wik can tell you more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_value
It absolutely means nothing because there is a queue of people that are desperate to accept any job. If you decide to ask for a higher salary then someone more desperate than you will take the job.
The paperclip maximiser algorithm doesn't actually require a computer, it could run just fine on a group of humans implemented as their set of intraorganizational rules.
2) Obviously if you can find workers for your compensation level that's some market definition of worth.
But I would also argue that ones society is broken if there are people who stay at a job where they have to resort to peeing in bottles because (ostensibly) they don't feel that taking 3 minutes to go to the bathroom is possible.